Mary Gilliland is the author of four poetry collections: Ember Days, The Devil’s Fools, winner of the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award and the CNY Poetry Award, The Ruined Walled Castle Garden, winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Prize, and Gathering Fire. Her poems are anthologized in the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2023 annual, Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems on Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice; Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands, and Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose. Honors include the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, the International Literary Seminars Kenya/Fence 1st Prize in Poetry, and a Cornell University Council on the Arts Faculty Grant to develop a section focused on the Labyrinth for the Society for Humanities course “Mind & Memory: Creativity in the Arts & Sciences.” She has served as faculty advisor for Ursus: Cornell's Environmental Journal and on the boards of the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Durland Alternatives Library, Light on the Hill Retreat Center (founding member), and Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies. After college she and her husband-to-be apprenticed to Gary Snyder in the Sierra foothills, studying Buddhism and helping build a wood-framed public school. Mary is a poet, ecologist, and occasional essayist in New York’s Finger Lakes Region. Find her at marygilliland.com and @newsthatstays.
Mary Gilliland
Studios
Veltin
Mary Gilliland worked in the Veltin studio.
Veltin Studio was donated by alumni of the Veltin School, a school for girls in New York with a highly respected visual arts department. As the plaque just outside the entrance attests, this studio was used by poet Edwin Arlington Robinson during most of the 24 summers he spent at MacDowell. Perhaps most famously, Thornton Wilder put the finishing…